Boulder police found a .20-gauge shotgun in Smika’s mother’s home in Akron. The gun had recently been oiled. Officers sent the gun to FBI headquarters near Washington D.C. for testing.

Shotgun pellets that killed Wells and were found in his head and those found in two shotgun shells taken from Smika’s hunting vest came from the same box, FBI forensics expert Roger Asbury had concluded.

Smika’s mother Darlene told police that her son suffered “from some type of blackouts or seizures where he could not control his actions but that he could remember what took place.”

Smika was always strapped for cash and couldn’t pay his bills. Two days before his death, Sid called a friend and told him that he had bought a large quantity of cocaine and that some of it was missing. Sid told the friend be believed Smika had taken the cocaine.

Smika gave police different versions of what happened. At one point he said he believed another Boulder man had stolen the cache of drugs from Sid.

He later admitted he had stolen $1,000 and a small amount of cocaine from the other man. He suggested that Sid may have been killed after being blamed for the theft of money and drugs.

This photo was taken in 1986. New Boulder, Co. District Attorney Alex Hunter. Denver Post file photo

Boulder police arrested Smika on Oct. 6, 1983 at his family home in Akron.

A Boulder County grand jury was convened to investigate the homicide. Alex Hunter, the former district attorney, made a secret agreement in writing with Smika’s public defender, Steve Jacobson, that the grand jury would not indict. Hunter also agreed that Smika’s mother and sister would not be called as witnesses.

Hunter has since acknowledged making a deal with Jacobson that if a grand jury was convened that it would not indict. He explained in recent years that that was because Jacobson agreed to allow Smika’s bond from expiring for an extra two weeks.

“To me, it was rather strange that he did that,” Sid’s mother, June Menger, has said. It didn’t make sense for a prosecutor to do that if he really wanted to make an arrest, she added.

Smika’s mother posted a $100,000 bond, and Smika left the Boulder County Jail.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.